US COWARDLY IS USING XINJIANG TO FIGHT CHINA

Why Xinjiang is central to US cold war on China 

As China seizes the tech innovation initiative, US has mobilized a rights-related diplomatic weapon to fight back By VIJAY PRASHAD And JIE XIONG APRIL 17, 2021

On March 22, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized sanctions against Wang Junzheng, the secretary of the Communist Party of China’s Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), and Chen Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB). These sanctions, Blinken said, were because Wang and Chen are accused of being party to “genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.” 

The US Treasury Department followed suit with its own sanctions. Wang and Mingguo responded by condemning these sanctions, which were not only imposed by the US but also by Canada, the UK and the European Union. Wang called the sanctions “a gross slander,” while Chen said he was “very proud of being sanctioned by these countries.” 

In October 2011, then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced a “pivot to Asia,” with China at the center of the new alignment. Clinton said many times – including in Hawaii in November 2011 – that the administration of former president Barack Obama wanted to develop “a positive and cooperative relationship with China,” the US military buildup along Asia’s coastline told a different story. The 2010 US Quadrennial Defense Review noted “China’s growing presence and influence in regional and global economic and security affairs” and called it “one of the most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape.” 

In 2016, US Navy Admiral Harry Harris, head of the Pacific Command, said the United States was ready to “confront China,” a statement given strength by the US military buildup around China. The administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have largely followed the “pivot to Asia” policy, with a special emphasis on China. The United States has been struggling to keep up with China’s rapid scientific and technological advancements and has few intellectual or industrial tools in place to compete. This is the reason it has tried to stall China’s advances using diplomatic and political power, and through information warfare; these elements comprise what is called a “hybrid war.” 

Information warfare Prior to a March 2019 event co-hosted by the US Mission to International Organizations in Geneva, most people the US were largely unaware of the existence of the Xinjiang region in China, let alone of the 13 million Uighur people (one of China’s 55 recognized ethnic minorities). Given that the Uighurs are the demographic majority in this westernmost province of China, the official name of the administrative unit is the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The March 2019 event featured Adrian Zenz, a German researcher and a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organization founded in 1993 by the US government to promote anti-communist views.

In April 2020, this foundation – against all evidence – accused China of being responsible for the global deaths resulting from the spread of Covid-19. Zenz is also associated with the conservative defense-policy think-tank the Jamestown Foundation, founded by William Geimer, who was close to the US administration of the late Ronald Reagan. Zenz and Ethan Gutmann, another researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, continued to repeat their conclusions regarding “genocide” in Xinjiang to the US Congress and in a range of mainstream publications. Hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Democracy Now, Zenz provided what appeared to be documentation of atrocities meted out by the “Chinese authorities” against the Uighur population. Zenz and Gutmann would be joined by organizations funded by Western governments but which – as non-governmental organizations – pose as independent research and advocacy groups (such as the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect and the Uighur Human Rights Project; the former is funded by Western governments and the latter by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy). 

In June last year, then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo attacked the Chinese government, basing his statements on Xinjiang on the “German researcher Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations.” Zenz provides a set of scientifically dubious and politically charged papers, which are then used as fact by the US government in its information war against China. Anyone raising questions about Zenz’ claims is, meanwhile, marginalized as a conspiracy theorist. Diplomatic and economic warfare The US government’s information warfare against China has produced the “fact” that there is genocide in Xinjiang. Once this has been established, it helps develop diplomatic and economic warfare. 

On March 22 this year, the same day as the US sanctions, the Council of the European Union unilaterally imposed asset freezes and travel bans on four Chinese government officials, including Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo as well as Wang Mingshan and Zhu Hailun. The United Kingdom and Canada also joined in this venture that day. It appeared to be a coordinated attempt to portray China as a country violating human rights. This assault came soon after China had achieved a major human-rights goal, lifting 850 million people from absolute poverty. The US government and its media outlets tried to challenge this remarkable achievement. Trump had pushed a trade war with China as soon as he came into office in January 2017; his policy framework remains in place under Biden. 

To draw together the trade war and the Xinjiang information war, in mid-December 2020, Zenz and the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy (formerly the Center for Global Policy) released an intelligence brief on “coercive labor in Xinjiang.” The claims in this briefing – building on a 2019 Wall Street Journal article on supply chains and Xinjiang – created a media firestorm in the West, amplified by Reuters and then picked up by many widely read outlets. It led to the US government ban on Xinjiang cotton. A third of the world’s textiles and clothing come from China, with the country accounting for US$120 billion worth of exports of these products per year and $300 billion in exports of all merchandise annually. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, 87% of China’s total cotton output comes from Xinjiang. Most of the high-quality Xinjiang cotton – and the textiles produced from it within China – go to Western apparel companies, such as H&M and Zara. In 2009, many of these companies created the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which has – until last year – been upbeat about developments in Xinjiang (including co-ops of small farmers in Xinjiang). 

As recently as March 26 this year, the BCI made a clear statement: “Since 2012, the Xinjiang project site has performed second-party credibility audits and third-party verifications over the years, and has never found a single case related to incidents of forced labor.” Despite the BCI’s recent confident statement and its optimism, things are rapidly changing for Xinjiang cotton farmers as the BCI appears to get on board with the United States’ intensifying hybrid war on China. The BCI closed down its page on its work in China, accused China of “forced labor” and other human-rights violations, and set up a Task Force on Forced Labor and Decent Work. Officials of Xinjiang’s government contested these claims, saying that much of the field labor for cotton in Xinjiang has already been replaced by machines (many of them imported from the US firm John Deere). A recent book edited by Hua Wang and Hafeezullah Memon, Cotton Science and Processing Technology, confirms this point, as do a range of media reports from before 2019. But facts like these don’t seem to stand a chance in the overwhelming information war. Xinjiang – two and a half times the size of France – is now at the epicenter of a cold war not of its own making. 

This article was produced by Globetrotter, which provided it to Asia Times.